Hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) workers are overwhelmed by alarms. Chemical and power industry standards for alarms are that one worker should be asked to respond to no more than 100-300 alarms per 8 hour shift. ICU nurses are routinely asked to respond to greater than 300 alarms in a shift (sometimes greater than 1000), the vast majority (95%) of which are false or non-critical. The Joint Commission which accredits and certifies more than 20,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States, in 2013 issued a white paper outlining the problems of alarm fatigue and declaring it a frequent and persistent problem and outlining proposals for dealing with it.
In order to evaluate any change in alarm management, it is important to be able to quantify and monitor the alarm problem. Current approaches to alarm management do not provide adequate tools for clinical personnel to understand alarm environments or evaluate patient-specific effects of changes to alarm thresholds.